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Today, 23 percent of the global population is Muslim, but ignorance and misinformation about Islam persist. In this fascinating and useful book, Perry Anderson interviews the noted scholar of Islam Suleiman Mourad about the Quran and the history of the faith.

Mourad elucidates the different stages in Islam’s development: the Quran as scripture and the history of its codification; Muhammad and the significance of his Sunna and Hadith; the Sunni-Shiʿi split and the formation of various sects; the development of jihad; the transition to modernity and the challenges of reform; and the complexities of Islam in the modern world. He also looks at Wahhabism from its inception in the eighteenth century to its present-day position as the movement that galvanized modern Salafism and gave rise to militant Islam or jihadism.

The Mosaic of Islam reveals both the richness and the fissures of the faith. It speaks of the different voices claiming to represent the religion and spans peaceful groups and manifestations as well as the bloody confrontations that disfigure the Middle East, such as the Saudi intervention in the Yemen and the collapse of Syria and Iraq.

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About the authors:

Suleiman Ali Mourad is Professor of Religion at the Smith College, Northampton, USA. He is the author of Early Islam between Myth and History, and is co-author of The Intensification and Reorientation of Sunni Jihad Ideology in the Crusader Period and co-editor of Jerusalem: Idea and Reality.

Perry Anderson teaches history at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The way the state dealt with two communal massacres and their aftermath in Bihar and Gujarat is a stinging commentary on India’s justice system in an area where it possibly matters the most.
Jayati Ghosh

Splintered Justice: Living the Horror of Mass Communal Violence in Bhagalpur and Gujarat captures the anatomy of a communal riot.

Kuldeep Kumar in The Hindu

[…] Based on interviews with victims and witnesses of Bhagalpur and Gujarat riots, what Warisha Farasat and Prita Jha have written goes to reinforce the terrible realisation that criminal justice system in our country has largely failed, and the bureaucracy and the police have been, to a large extent, politicised and communalised. It is the same heart-rending story of how FIRs were either not registered or, if registered, heavily doctored by the police persons themselves, how investigation was conducted that often led nowhere, how witnesses were intimidated or eliminated and how justice was not only delayed but often denied. The governments of the day watched over these manufactured incidents of mass violence without doing much to control the situation. Post-riot relief was often selectively distributed. The two detailed accounts of the Bhagalpur and Gujarat riots also bring out the oft-ignored reality of gender violence being used as a weapon of communal violence.

As Harsh Mander and Navsharan Singh ask in their introduction, “did the governments in Assam in 1983, Delhi in 1984, Mumbai in 1992-93, and Gujarat in 2002 or Kandhamal in 2008, fail to prevent slaughter and arson because they lacked sufficient powers or legal muscle?” The obvious answer is an emphatic ‘No’.

Warisha Farasat and Prita Jha have made a valuable contribution to the growing literature on communal riots in India through their first-hand interviews with those who bore the brunt of these massacres. Reading through these accounts is an eye-opening experience. It is an experience that shakes the very foundations of one’s belief in human goodness but also makes one better prepared to face the grim reality.

Romila Thapar‘s new book of essays, Indian Society and the Secular, arrives at a time when India is facing its greatest challenges since Independence in 1947. With ultra right in power and forces of Hindu nationalism out to revise the very idea of a pluralistic, democratic and secular republic and recast it into a Hindu rashtra. She argues that secularism is not alien to Indian society and its intellectual traditions.

“Dalits and Adivasis in India’s Business Economy: Three Essays and an Atlas” captures the experience of doing business in a caste-conscious social environment

KULDEEP KUMAR writes in The Hindu, 5 March 2016:

The suicide of Dalit researcher Rohith Vemula, termed “institutionalised murder” by many a commentator, has focused the nation’s attention on the status of the Dalits and other disadvantaged sections of our society as we approach the 70th anniversary of the country’s Independence next year.

Despite the “Swachchh Bharat Abhiyan” (“Clean India Campaign”) launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, not much has changed on the ground and there are an estimated 1.3 million manual scavengers in the country. Manual scavenging is a euphemism for removing faeces from dry toilets and open drains by hand and carrying them to the place of disposal. For centuries, this task has been forcibly thrust upon the members of the untouchable communities – a recent report informs us that of the 1.3 million manual scavengers, nearly 90 per cent are women. Thus, besides being an issue of caste-based discrimination, manual scavenging also involves gender-based discrimination.

Despite this shameful reality, it is also a fact that many Dalits like Rohith Vemula have tried to improve their lot by getting education and gainful employment. However, whenever we discuss the condition of the two most disadvantaged communities – Dalits and tribals – we seldom look at their role in the country’s economy in general and corporate world in particular. The same holds true for the other disadvantaged community – that of the Muslims who constitute the largest minority group in the Indian society.

Three Essays Collective, a one-man publishing house started by well-known Hindi poet Asad Zaidi to make a meaningful intervention, has brought out an excellent book titled “Dalits and Adivasis in India’s Business Economy: Three Essays and an Atlas”. It has been written by Barbara Harriss-White, Emeritus Professor of Development Studies at the Oxford University, in collaboration with Elisabetta Basile, Anita Dixit, Pinaki Joddar, Aseem Prakash and Kaushal Vidyarthee.

Ten years ago, Three Essays Collective had also published a pioneering study “Muslims in Indian Economy” written by Omar Khalidi. Reading both these books together, one gets an idea of how dismal the situation really is and, in the absence of corrective measures, how this can lead to fault lines one day erupting with serious consequences for the nation and its polity.

Some years ago, a friend of mine at JNU proudly told me about a book that he had picked up from the library “sale”, a book that had once belonged to D D Kosambi (DDK). Apparently it had not been checked out for years, and was therefore deemed unworthy of staying on in the library, as if finding a place on the library shelf was just some sort of evolutionary game, a survival of the fittest and no more…

The JNU had, at some point in time, acquired Kosambi’s personal collection of books, that was, according to Mr R P Nene (DDK’s friend and assistant, in an interview in June 1985) “sold by his family after his death to the JNU at the cost of Rs. 75,000.” Details of how this happened are not too clear- Kosambi died in 1966, the JNU was founded in 1969, and the initial seed of the JNU library was that of the “prestigious Indian School of International Studies which was later merged with Jawaharlal Nehru University.” Our website goes on to say that the “JNU Library is a depository of all Govt. publications and publications of some important International Organisations like WHO, European Union, United Nations and its allied agencies etc. The Central Library is knowledge hub of Jawaharlal Nehru University, It provides comprehensive access to books, journals, theses and dissertations, reports, surveys covering diverse disciplines.”

To read Of Gardens and of Graves is to witness the coming to life of Yeats’ famous line: “A terrible beauty is born”. It is to be reminded, if ever a reminder was needed, of the lingering pain that seeps slowly and eternally through the flooded scars of Kashmir, the scowl of the last half a century that darkens the fate of every subject, born under the auspices of its melancholic sky. It is hard to classify the book into a genre as it repudiates traditional hierarchies by refusing to be neatly categorized into one – it is simultaneously a memoir, a critical commentary, an anthology, collaboration, and a history all rolled into one, held together by a single source- Kashmir. An arbitrary classification of the book structure could be that the book comprises of three basic divisions: Essays, translations and photographs. On a reading, though, the narratives under each rubric just blend with each other, without any manifest hierarchy.

To read the full review click here http://theluxembourgreview.org/2015/08/08/of-gardens-and-graves-by-suvir-kaul-a-review/